In most of the world (but not America) they have World Book Day. On World Book Day, in the UK, schoolchildren are given book tokens to buy books with, and a selection of special World Book Day Books are written and published and put on sale. The authors are not paid; the publishers do it for nothing. The idea is to get children reading
Last year I wrote a book for the UK’s World Book Day, a new book called Odd and the Frost Giants. It is a book about an unlucky boy named Odd, with an irritating smile and a crippled leg, in a Norwegian village over a thousand years ago, and how he meets a fox, a bear, and an eagle, and winds up travelling to Asgard to rescue the Norse Gods from the Frost Giants.
It was fun to write, and challenging—the best challenge was whether it would be possible to write a story that felt like a novel in 15,000 words—a quarter the length of a normal novel, but the longest that a World Book Day book could be.
I was thrilled when the book became a UK bestseller. I was delighted when my American publishers, HarperChildrens, told me they wanted to publish it in the US, and elated when I learned it would be illustrated by Brett Helquist, whose art I had loved ever since I first picked up The Bad Beginning.
Sooner or later—probably sooner—I’ll write another astonishingly short novel about Odd. I want to send him to Jerusalem, where the Vikings went, and further than that. He’s an extraordinarily delightful character to write, after all...
Neil